Four Funny Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. If you're new to Louisiana, do try the boiled crawfish, but know (Item 7) that it's a faux pas to eat them at your desk at work:

Now, crawfish are delicious but they are both 1) fragrant and 2) messy. I love a good weekend crawfish boil where you're eating outside with family and friends and wearing old clothes.

You could smell the crawfish as soon as you got off the elevator. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and wore several napkins as bibs to keep from getting anything on his shirt.

Finished and did the surgeon just-scrubbed-in walk to the bathroom so he could wash his messy, messy hands. We had to call maintenance to come empty the garbage cans because the smell permeated the office and we couldn't work that way that afternoon.

The above comes from a collection of other similarly amusing first impressions by new coworkers at Ask a Manager.

2. At The Speculative Grammarian one R.S. Sriyatha expounds on ancient Greek verbal fillers:

The perspicacious reader will have already figured out where this paper is headed (aside from oblivion). It is obvious, when we consider that Xenophon did not write down his work himself, but rather dictated it, that it is the student rather than the instructor who has translated the text most faithfully. No one, in speech, says things like, "Thereupon, accordingly, indeed, on the one hand, they pitched camp; and then on the next day also likewise they arose indeed and accordingly marched ten stades." But everyone says things like, "So, um, ah, un...they pitched camp; and, well, the next day...ah, you know, they got up, um, and, ah, marched ten stades."

What more need I say here? It is obvious that for hundreds of years classicists have misinterpreted the meaning of Greek particles. Most, if not all of them, have no meaning whatsoever...

The piece, which popped up at Hacker News recently, is from the 1990 issue of that satirical journal, for which a friend from my Rice days sometimes contributed. I didn't know it has been around that long, and I'm glad to see it's still there.

3. A recently-retired Ford executive has made the Wall Street Journal for maintaining an extensive record of his coworkers' verbal flubs:

The risk of getting flagged added to the pressure of presenting at meetings, Murphy said. "All the sudden you'll hear a pen click, and you're thinking, 'What did I say that wasn't right?'" Often, a Board Word would help defuse an intense meeting, he said.

Murphy appreciates O'Brien's grievance process, where he allows the person to argue their case before the entry is made. Murphy rarely wins the appeal, though, like the time he blurted out: "He's going to be so happy he'll be like a canary in a coal mine!"

O'Brien explained that the canary in that particular idiom ends up dead. Murphy, laughing, explained that the canary was probably happy when it first got down there.

There are several pictures of his records, which he kept on whiteboards in his office.

4. I'll end with a visual: Yes, This Photo From Everest Is Real.

-- CAV

AI Outing Cranks, Mentally Ill

"No mind is better than the precision of its concepts." -- Ayn Rand

***

The headline and blurb of an article at Rolling Stone well describe a tragic phenomenon at the intersection of advanced technology and primitive philosophy (and possibly mental illness): "People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies", and Self-styled prophets are claiming they have 'awakened' chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT.

Likewise, the following, on the flood of responses to a Reddit post by one of these AI widows, does well enough to elaborate (The whole piece is about a ten minute read.):

Kat was both "horrified" and "relieved" to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled "Chatgpt induced psychosis," the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model "gives him the answers to the universe." Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was "talking to him as if he is the next messiah." The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy -- all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. "He would listen to the bot over me," she says. "He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon," she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as "spiral starchild" and "river walker." [links omitted, bold added]

Even if we grant that artificial intelligence even is intelligence or that some bot has evolved sentience, the following Ayn Rand quote applies to both the program (in part) and its user (wholly):

Many people, particularly today, claim that man cannot live by logic alone, that there's the emotional element of his nature to consider, and that they rely on the guidance of their emotions. Well, ... the joke is on ... them: man's values and emotions are determined by his fundamental view of life. The ultimate programmer of his subconscious is philosophy -- the science which, according to the emotionalists, is impotent to affect or penetrate the murky mysteries of their feelings.

The quality of a computer's output is determined by the quality of its input. If your subconscious is programmed by chance, its output will have a corresponding character. You have probably heard the computer operators' eloquent term "gigo" -- which means: "Garbage in, garbage out." The same formula applies to the relationship between a man's thinking and his emotions. [bold added]

To the best of my limited knowledge, AI is -- unlike humans -- incapable of forming abstractions, and would be severely handicapped even if it could because -- forming its output from human-provided training sets -- it has no perceptual connection with reality with which to form valid concepts. Any abtractions it could form at this point would presumably be akin to floating abstractions:

"Floating abstractions" [are] ... concepts detached from existents, concepts that a person takes over from other men without knowing what specific units the concepts denote. ("Definition as the Final Step in Concept-Formation," Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 96.)

In this new phenomenon, the AI user is simply accepting these mystical abstractions (or even arbitrary assertions) indirectly from the humans who originated the training data, and perhaps modfied by the AI. (I'd be tempted to treat anything mystical sounding from an AI like the more obvious phenomenon of AI hallucinations, if not classify it as a type of hallucination.)

Even if there were a nonhuman intelligence, such as a space alien or a sentient program, anyone interacting with it would have the same obligation to himself he now does with other humans: Satisfy himself about the extent to which what he is hearing is true, and non-arbitrary.

Falling for some story about being a messiah, or, for that matter, passively accepting a repackaged science fiction trope about a program "awakening" are evidence of very poor thinking habits: While it would be devastating to see a loved one fall off such a cliff, I would rather know sooner than later. As we see here, there is a strong chance that the significant other needs help, the relationship is untenable, or both.

I strongly suspect that anyone succumbing to such fantasies is some serious combination of gullible, mystically-inclined, subjectivist, second-handed, or mentally ill.

Many of these "widows" will be better off in the long run.

-- CAV

Great News for Ossoff or Maybe Abrams

As if the Trump-Harris presidential matchup weren't already ample evidence that our political milieu has descended into farce, MAGA conspiracy nut Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is reportedly considering a run for Jon Ossoff's Senate seat or the Governorship of Georgia.

If nothing else, this news exposes the parlous state of the Republican Party -- which is evenly split between delusional MAGA types and cowardly traditional Republicans.

We'll look at the traditional Republicans first. To the reporter's credit and my great surprise, he managed to find a Republican officeholder who, although he is much more diplomatic than Greene deserves, at least calls out her nuttiness:

"That is a swing state that's pretty independent minded," he added. "If I was to put my political science hat on and look at all the criteria, she wouldn't be high on my list of recruits."

[Kevin] Cramer [R-ND] wrote an essay for Newsweek in 2021 that called out Greene for endorsing some of the "crazier" theories [sic] floating around in conservative circles, such as claims that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington were an inside job, or that the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida was a false flag.

He also flagged her suggestion in 2018 that a deadly California wildfire was caused by laser beams from space and that it might have been part of a scheme by wealthy financiers to clear space for a high-speed train line. She later deleted her post from Facebook.

"I think she's recanted some of the crazier things she's said," Cramer acknowledged, but he insisted that "electability is one of the more important criteria in recruiting a candidate." [bold added]

Cramer may well be the bravest sane Republican left, but this is generous to a fault in terms of diplomacy. Not so long ago, it might have been easy to find a Republican who would say something like If they run her, they are out of their minds.

On the other hand... I'm no politician nor do I deal much with people like Greene. Perhaps Cramer is being diplomatic because he's afraid any sort of confrontation -- especially with facts -- will only embolden her.

Here's what one of Greene's staff had to say:

A spokesperson for Greene said that Senate Republicans are "afraid of her" and questioned whether senators poo-pooing the idea truly support Trump's MAGA agenda.

"These are likely the same Republicans refusing to confirm President Trump's nominees, like Ed Martin, because they never stood with [Trump] and still don't," the spokesperson said, referring to Trump's controversial pick [a lawyer for January 6th rioters --ed] to serve as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

...

Greene's spokesperson said she would cruise to the Senate Republican nomination if she jumps in the race.

"Polling shows Congresswoman Greene would blow out a primary. She has the same type of support President Trump has, and now he's president," the spokesperson said. "She has one of the largest digital files in all of Congress, has donors from all 50 states, and has over 11.6 million followers on her social media.

"Congresswoman Greene would be any candidate's worst nightmare," the source said. [bold added]

Of course: To a mind constantly marinating in the MAGA echo chamber, the only possible reasons someone could oppose such a luminary are betrayal to the Dear Leader or cowardice.

Given Trump's stranglehold on the GOP, she might well be any Republican candidate's worst nightmare, but hard-core Trumpists are hardly a majority of the general electorate, and Georgia is a swing state, as the article indicates repeatedly.

Should Greene run for Senate, I would expect Jon Ossoff to return to Washington, and should she run for Governor, I could see Stacey Abrams taking advantage of the chance to be the "sane" candidate.

-- CAV

Teixeira on '28

Yesterday, I commented on the likelihood of the Democrats learning the wrong lessons from their defeat in the '24 elections.

That is a bleak possibility indeed, but the fact remains that, at least as of now, no Trump-like figure has gutted the party apparatus, along with having a big-enough cultish following to guarantee making its primaries a mere formality. If things remain this way, what might a best-case scenario look like for the '28 election, assuming the Republicans put up another Trumpist or a Christian Nationalist?

Ruy Teixeira is (or leans) "Progressive," but nevertheless seems to have a good feel for what centrist voters can tolerate or support. He recently wrote a piece titled "Your 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders!", of which a slightly shorter version also appeared at The Free Press.

Within, he speculates on what kinds of candidates might arise, grouping them into the following categories (I've added an exemplar from his description of each category in parentheses.):

• Let's do it all over again! (Kamala Harris)
• All resistance, all the time. (Gavin Newsom)
• There's no such thing as being too progressive. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)
• Moderation is a beautiful thing. (Josh Shapiro)
• Let's try something different. (Ruben Gallego)

Teixeira gives a brief description of each category, but from my pro-capitalist perspective, his five categories collapse into two.

Given that Joe Biden ran as a centrist, but governed as a progressive, I'd combine Let's do it all over again! with There's no such thing as being too progressive. In addition, the left usually goes bat shit crazy over Trump for (a) the wrong reasons and prematurely at that, and (b) the right reasons and weakly/hypocritically at that.

As an example of the first, many leftists seem convinced that Trump is about to end Social Security. He should, and there are ways to do that which don't constitute throwing widows and orphans into the streets, but he has stated repeatedly that he won't, and he knows that MAGA doesn't want him to touch that program.

As an example of the second, consider their apoplexy about SignalGate as compared to the crickets about, say, Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as Secretary of State. Partisans almost uniformly will say What about the other official as if this excuses the sins of their own people when, in fact, both are outrages, and outrages aren't okay just because "our guys" do them.

To this first group, I'd throw in All resistance, all the time. This strategy does not offer a positive to voters, and see again my comments on progressive anger about Trump above. There are many, many very good reasons to oppose Trump that aren't knee-jerk or tribal, and which therefore don't need Trump living rent-free in someone's head 24/7 -- nor can they or should they similarly form the entire basis for a campaign.

That said, Teixeira does warn that a bad-enough Trump term could make it possible for "even AOC" to win.

I am having trouble seeing a difference between Moderation is a beautiful thing and Let's try something different, and am inclined to call any of these Possibly sane. In a recent conversation with a friend, he mooted Josh Shapiro and I Jared Polis -- whom Teixeira places in Moderation and Something Different respectively as candidates we might be able to support, with qualifications.

In sum, I see some hope that a reasonable candidate could run against the Trump Party nominee in 2028, but am unsure such a candidate would win the nomination for reasons I elaborated on yesterday.

-- CAV

Wrong Lessons Learned RE: 2024

Anyone (like myself) hoping for the Democrats to soul-search and offer a real (read: pro-freedom) alternative to the Trump Party will be disappointed in what has been happening over there lately.

I'm seeing headlines to the effect that the far-left loons who turned off enough voters to get Trump reelected -- and who control the Democratic Party -- are going to double down on their nuttiness.

At The Spectator World is a short piece on the phenomenon:

Take the confidently clueless David Hogg, a Jacobin child of Eden, the Democratic party vice-chair. His strategy for growing the party? Purge it. Drive out moderates in primaries. Burn the center to save the movement. To win the middle in general elections, Hogg would abolish it in primaries. Hogg might agree with Robespierre: “Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.” Hogg has sent a signal that the base will consider not being sufficiently enthusiastic about the revolution a punishable offense in Democratic primaries.

And Hogg is not alone.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is. This is exactly what Trump did to the Republican Party ahead of his election, with his version of abolishing the middle in the primaries being to shorten them so much that no insurgent could make a case, much less win.

One should note that this got Trump elected mainly because he was the last man standing and his alternative was so unpopular. It certainly wasn't because Trump made a resolute, uncompromising case for freedom that appealed to the hearts and minds of the most voters.

Does Hogg genuinely (but wrongly) believe that he is preparing his party to make such a winning pitch, or is he, with a politician's low cunning, betting that Trump will have set the table for his party this time around?

Your guess is as good as mine, but the end result is the same: The Democrats are, so far, taking exactly the wrong lesson from their defeat to Trump. They are not asking themselves why they didn't appeal to enough ordinary Americans ("the middle"), but how they can be the beneficiaries of yet another farce of an election with no good alternative at all.

Interestingly, the analyst also learns the wrong lesson. I am otherwise unfamiliar with Alex Castellanos, who describes himself as having "been a Republican when our party has lost the middle," but here he urges what traditional Republicans have done for generations, often losing in the process: abandon "extremism."

Has he forgotten Ronald Reagan, who for all his many flaws, stood his ground and championed economic freedom (both comparatively to the vast majority of modern politicians) on his way to victory?

Hogg and Castellanos are each half-right. A wishy-washy "centrist" who stands for nothing but the status quo (ante?) will galvanize no one in the primaries or the general, but Hogg's own kind of anti-freedom beliefs will lose against any sane candidate (or any candidate who can look sane by comparison) in the general.

Castellanos sees the problem a far leftist will have winning the general, but, like other Republicans, doesn't grasp what freedom is or why most voters should value it enough to see that that "extreme" could win an election.

Someone who can make a positive case for freedom to enough voters can win, and I think whichever party (including a new one, if need be) frees up its selection process, such as by using ranked-choice voting, could find someone "the middle" would favor and subsequently win the election. That person could govern well-enough not to merely set the table for the other party in the next election. Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air!

So far, I don't see anyone in politics out there who seems aware of this possibility.

-- CAV

Recipe: A Pot Roast I Actually Like!

I am pretty sure that at some point in the past, my wife, who likes pot roast, asked me to come up with a recipe for it. Since most pot roasts I have encountered over the years have been some combination of dry, tough, and flavorless, I procrastinated, not confident of a good reward-to-effort ratio.

But I did not forget about her request, and serendipity came to my eventual rescue in the form of my running into a recipe for "Mississippi Pot Roast" at Belle of the Kitchen.

This recipe promised everything I hoped for: simplicity, ease, and flavor. At least I won't have to kill myself to make something boring I thought.

This recipe overdelivered: I like the end result and look forward to making it again. I recommend it for its superior flavor and extreme tenderness. In fact, immediately after cooking, the meat will be too tender to cut and will have to be shredded.

This is all on top of it being one of the easiest complete meals I now know how to make.

As usual, I'll present my version below. The main differences between it and the original are that (1) I use a combination of beef bouillon and spices instead of an au jus mix packet, which I simply couldn't find, and (2) I explicitly include the side vegetables, which are only mentioned as options in the original recipe.

We got six servings and enough leftover beef for a couple of sandwiches out of this.

***

Preparation Time is 10 minutes plus an addition step near the end of cooking.

Ingredients

• chuck roast, 3-4 lb.
• ranch dressing mix, 1 packet
• beef bouillon cube
• onion powder, 1 tsp
• parsley, 1 tsp
• garlic powder, 1/2 tsp
• pepper, 1/2 tsp
• butter, 1/4 cup
• pepperoncini, 4-5
• baby carrots, 1 lb.
• baby potatoes, 1.5 lb.

Directions

1. Place chuck roast in bottom of crock pot.
2. Crush bouillon cube.
3. Sprinkle dressing mix, bouillon, and other spices over top of meat.
4. Place butter and peppers on top of the meat.
5. Cook on low for eight hours.
6. At six hours, dump carrots and potatoes into pot, and allow to cook for the remaining two hours.

Notes

1. It does not matter if the liquid in the pot does not cover the vegetables: They will cook anyway.

-- CAV

RFK Jr.: The 'Theory' and Practice of a Kook

Two posts on the "theory" and practice of the head of HHS have come to my attention this morning.

The first, at Ars Technica, is the more shocking to me, because as loony as I know Bobby Kennedy to be, I never in a million years would have guessed that he rejects the germ theory of disease in favor of what he incorrectly calls the miasma theory of disease.

To be fair, it does help in a big way to understand the nuttiness. The below passage includes quotes from Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci:

In the chapter [titled "The White Man's Burden"], Kennedy promotes the "miasma theory" but gets the definition completely wrong. Instead of actual miasma theory, he describes something more like terrain theory. He writes: "'Miasma theory' emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses."

Kennedy contrasts his erroneous take on miasma theory with germ theory, which he derides as a tool of the pharmaceutical industry and pushy scientists to justify selling modern medicines. The abandonment of miasma theory, Kennedy bemoans, realigned health and medical institutions to "the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition."

According to Kennedy, germ theory gained popularity, not because of the undisputed evidence supporting it, but by "mimicking the traditional explanation for disease -- demon possession -- giving it a leg up over miasma [sic]."

To this day, Kennedy writes, a "$1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons, and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology led by 'Little Napoleon' himself, Anthony Fauci, fortify the century-old predominance of germ theory." [bold added]

There's the theory. Elsewhere, Derek Lowe presents another of many installments on how the practice -- abetted by improper government -- is panning out. Then, he provides an apt summary of where things stand in parallel with our nation's foolish experiment with the equally discredited theory of mercantilism:

The situation is very close to what's happening with US trade and the economy in general. We're just starting to feel the tremors from this administration's idiotic, destructive, historically wrongheaded tariff policies, and over the next couple of months that's going to get worse and worse. Because of the timing of shipping and the supply chains involved that'll be the case even if the president were to wake up tomorrow and rescind all of it, which I would not hold my breath waiting for. Right now we're at the split-second where you bang some part of your body against a hard object and have just enough time to realize that it's going to hurt. And people are going to have to hear about just why this is happening and who did it to them.

So it is with US scientific research, but on a longer, slower scale. When you cut the funds, deny the grants, fire the scientists, harass the grad students and postdocs who have come from overseas to participate in the greatest scientific infrastructure the world has ever seen, well ... what do you expect to happen? Just as with all those cargo ships, even if you suddenly woke up and tried to take it all back, immense damage has already been done, and the longer it goes on the harder it will be to get things moving again. People have left, and more will leave. Instruments and facilities are being shut down. Supplies don't get ordered. New hires and new students just don't get taken on, and the projects wither no matter how hard you try. In the months and years to come, the signs of this horrible fit of self-destruction will be clear to see in the US research world, and I just hope that we are able to eventually work our way back to what we had just a few months ago. But there is no guarantee of that, is there?

On top of the damage itself being hard to repair, our country is going to suffer severe reputational damage absent someone responsible coming in after Trump and limiting the ability of any future President to single-handedly upend things this way again. Otherwise, even if we could substantially repair the damage, what businessman -- or future scientist from abroad -- would, in his right mind, risk his time and treasure on dealing with a nation led by crackpots?

-- CAV

Updates

5-9-25: Corrected typo in link to Derek Lowe piece.